A blog for developing my thoughts on gaming mechanisms for solo miniatures and board gaming. Solo gaming mechanics, campaign rules, and battle reports illustrating the use of the mechanics will all be a part of the blog.

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Monday, September 10, 2012

I have a couple of gaming buddies that say they want to settle on one set of rules for all of their gaming periods. One has selected the Black Powder/Hail Caesar route and I think the other is probably happy with the Memoir 44/Command and Colors route. Once upon a time I was happy with using DBA/HOTT for everything, but found it did not work (for me) once shooting was the primary form of attack. Since then I have switched to the concepts of Borg's Command and Colors designs, but being an incurable tinkerer, my games start to meld together with regards to the rules, when I am gaming solo.

I like campaign games because they allow you to have a sense of continuity between your battles, building narratives and histories, and get into battles that you might not normally want to game as a one-off but which have interest when played within a campaign context. The problem is developing a campaign system that does not fall apart after one battle goes against you. The campaigns I tend to play are:

You start with a certain number of units, some means of restoring units lost during the game, and some means of adding new units. Play continues until one player calls it quits, usually because their losses have been so bad that they cannot win any more battles.

Ones that run the course of years with each year (one to three campaign turns) culminating in a single, large battle. Surviving units gain experience, lost units have to rebuild, and Generals acquire a history and maybe some abilities.

You start with a certain number of points, or each battle is set at a certain number of points, and winning or losing has consequences with the next battle(s). The Memoir 44 campaign books are like this.

I tend to prefer the first type as it has the most continuity between battles - units lost in one battle may not be available in the next - but it is also the most likely to fail and end abruptly when a battle goes particularly badly. The first problem I try and solve is what happens to units "destroyed" in the battle. As that question largely depends upon what the game's definition of "unit" and "destroyed" is, I will direct the discussion towards the BattleLore rules, which are my favorite set of fantasy mass combat rules.

In BattleLore a unit is largely undefined in terms of size or strength, but is an autonomous body with regards to movement and combat. When it is "destroyed" it means that it is no longer combat effective, but not necessarily "every man dead". Although you cannot bring units "back to life", you can bring figures back (e.g. with healing spells, healing pools, etc.). Also, loss of figures during the course of the battle results in no loss of combat power, so a "figure" in a unit better represents the loss of the unit's willingness to fight. At some point the unit simply collapses1 and is no longer combat effective.

So, it is easy to imagine a unit fighting with relatively few losses, until a few key individuals become wounded or killed, then the unit dissolving in a panic. After the battle the men would straggle back to their unit - think The Red Badge of Courage - ready to fight again another day. So, I can see two possible results when a unit loses figures in a battle:

The unit is truly destroyed as an effective fighting unit, or

The unit is restored, although it may take some time to recover its morale.

I also see two factors in determining how well a unit might recover:

Did the unit's side win or lose the battle, and

How many figures did the unit lose?

As I dislike using normal dice when playing Command and Colors type games, it makes sense to use the BattleLore dice when determining unit recoveries. As the Flag represents morale events, it makes sense it should represent morale-oriented results in battle recovery. Hits are represented by the color of the unit, with the Shield representing special hits; the same will apply with battle recovery. I propose the following process for Post-Battle Recovery in my upcoming campaign.

Destroyed Unit Check: Check each destroyed unit to determine if it is permanently lost.

Routed Unit Check: Check each destroyed unit that passed the Destroyed Unit Check to determine if it is routed.

Demoralized Unit Check: Check each unit that lost any figures (or a destroyed unit that passed both the Destroyed Unit Check and the Routed Unit Check) to determine if it demoralized.

Destroyed Unit Check

A unit destroyed at the end of a battle must make a Destroyed Unit Check to determine if it is permanently destroyed. Check each unit separately by rolling a single die for the destroyed unit. Destroyed units on the winning side are permanently destroyed if the icon rolled is the same banner color as the unit; units on the losing side do so if the banner color or a Shield is rolled. A permanently destroyed unit is removed from the list of units in the army.

Routed Unit Check

A unit destroyed at the end of a battle, and which passed the Destroyed Unit Check, must make a Routed Unit Check to determine if it is routed. Check each unit separately by rolling a single die for the destroyed unit. Destroyed units, whether on the winning or losing side, are routed if the icon rolled is a Flag. A routed unit is removed from the list of units in the army for the next battle only.

Demoralized Unit Check

A unit destroyed at the end of the battle, and which passed the Destroyed Unit Check and the Routed Unit Check, or which lost any number of figures must make a Demoralized Unit Check to determine if it starts the next battle demoralized. Check each unit separately by rolling one die for each figure lost by the unit during the battle. If any of the dice come up with a Flag icon the unit is demoralized. A demoralized unit is indicated as such on the list of units in the army; demoralized units start with one figure less than the maximum number in the next battle.

Summary

I would like to hear from some of the other readers how you handle this simple, basic problem of making campaigns work. Next time I will look at maps.

1 This reminds me of John Keegan's description in The Face of Battle, which theorizes that only a few men are actually effective in combat, so the loss of a few of the non-effective men has no real effect on the combat power of the unit. It is when those effective men die that the unit tends to collapse, and rather quickly at that.

About Me

I am 50 yrs old now. I bought a house in Huachuca City, AZ (although I have a townhouse in Houston, TX and a small home in Tucson, AZ) working on a contract for "the next two years" that is going on five years now. To while away the hours I like to wargame -- with wooden, lead, and sometimes paper miniatures -- usually solo. Although I am a 'rules junkie', I almost always use rules of my own (I like to build upon others' ideas, but it seems like there is always something "missing" or "wrong").